The Old School Otaku Lounge

Daisuki's pulled Zeta and ZZ Gundam from their website (along with the older titles they had, DBZ and Lupin III). BUT, they will still be on Youtube until the 4th of July, so if you'd been putting off watching either of them, better do it quickly before you'll be forced to downloading fansubs again. :/

That kind of sucks - I enjoyed jumping onto Daisuki every so often and checking out a Dragonball Z for nostalgia's sake. I just checked and DBZ was still up but Sunrise has removed the Gundam selections already (only Buddy Complex remains) and TMS is gone entirely from their sponsoring studios. I was waiting for ZZ to get caught up where I left it on fansubs to really get into it and send some advertising cash.

I can't say that I will miss their streams of Zeta Gundam, though. The subtitle track was the second run of it but still retained the theme music replacements from the North American DVDs. Lupin III, too, I can't say I will miss much since it was a dub-only availability and they used the modified* Geneon/Pioneer dub that appeared on [adult swim]. I wonder if some of the initial companies that bought into the Daisuki model were re-thinking their commitment, like they were not seeing enough adrev, or if it is part of a normal, scheduled cycle. I'm leaning towards adrev or something like that, particularly for Z Gundam and Lupin which had previous NA DVD releases and products that had some controversy surrounding them in the fan community. Neither series, as I recall, was fully available on Daisuki (though it was the plan) and even Dragonball Z is still only in the early 50s in terms of episode count available. ZZ's removal is probably part of some weird hybrid reason of the two.

I know we've discussed the pros and cons of streaming stuff like this and the short-notice removal (or no-notice of removal in some cases) is probably going to be one of the new norms and definitely, I agree, certainly on the list of cons.

*I used the term "modified dub" to describe the Lupin III dub in this instance, mostly for lack of a better word. In case you may not remember or didn't ever catch it, the dub to the 1978 Lupin III TV series wasn't an adaptation based off of a strict translation of the series - jokes, references and a little bit of language liberty was taken for an old show to appear on late night TV in the early to mid 2000s. While it wasn't a complete re-write of the show, like, say, FUNimation's work on Crayon Shin-chan, it was less faithful than a lot of fans were used to at that point. And it caught a ton of flak, which I don't think is entirely deserved.

I swear to God, Daisuki is disappointing lately. Revisiting an episode of Zeta, or the last two episodes, was great and easy with Daisuki. Guess I'll just rebuy the DVDs or import the Blu Rays when I get more money.

Apparently they re-added DBZ (dunno why they pulled it temp), but yeah...no idea why Zeta and ZZ were pulled. It's a bummer because ZZ was never released here on DVD so that was the only way to watch it legally...now people will be forced to import or download fansubs again.